The Sixth School Ch. 061

It was all made up, of course. Greg didn't have a sister inside the dungeon. He, however, had thought long and hard about how he'd go about this. For all their dysfunction, the two before him seemed to, in their own convoluted way, love each other. If he just killed the man, with no reason or justification, it was almost certain to turn the wife against him. At best, she would just refuse to cooperate with him, at worst, she would try to sabotage his plans if not outright kill him. No, if he was going to take out the husband, he'd have to give a justification that not even she could argue against.

Luckily for Greg, the two had already given him the bits and pieces he'd need to put his plan together. From her, Greg had gotten the confession that she knew that her husband was more than a mere merchant. During his very first dungeon run, after he'd had his first run-in with Sir Joram, he'd gone to find the man's wife in the garden of this mansion. That's where she'd admitted that she knew about her husband's darker dealings and that she was scared by it. She'd even said that she feared that Greg would be killed for the stunt that they pulled. This fact made it so that Greg didn't have to worry about evidence. All he'd have to do was raise accusations that sounded plausible and she would be inclined to believe them to be true.

The blonde thief that Greg met during his first dungeon run had told him that almost everything on the dark side of the city had this man's mark on it. As such, he could have made up any accusation and the merchant probably would've been guilty of it. Fortunately for Greg, it was Sir Joram himself who had given him all the ammunition he needed to make his story airtight. In his last dungeon run before his break, Greg had forced himself into the role of the man's bodyguard. In an odd twist, after the Owl-eyed noble Sir Lark had almost bought him out from the merchant, Sir Joram had come to fully trust that he was loyal to the highest bidder, which at the time, was him.

This made it so that during his meeting with the spider queen, he was a little more open with the details of his operations than he would have otherwise been. That the man was into loan sharking and owned a few illicit brothels didn't come as that much of a surprise to Greg. In fact, it was among the more tame of the man's operations. From what Greg could put together from the conversation, Sir Joram was involved in everything from illegal fighting rings, and the sale of a certain drug codenamed 'spice', to darker things like the sale of slaves. The man didn't expose anything too critical to his operations, but he gave enough peripheral details that Greg could weave a tale that the man wouldn't be able to deny. His inability to deny what Greg was accusing him of was all that Greg was going for.

This wasn't a court where someone's guilt needed to be proved beyond reasonable doubt before a judgment was rendered. The merchant's fate was sealed from the moment Greg started this dungeon run. But if he couldn't deny what Greg was accusing him of, then in his wife's eyes, he would essentially be admitting that Greg's accusations were true. Vengeance for one's family member was a motivation that few people wouldn't be able to understand or even relate to. Greg didn't harbor any illusions that the woman wouldn't be unhappy with him for killing her husband. She, however, wouldn't be able to fault him for wanting to get revenge for his 'sister'. That, however, was just the first layer of his plan.

Greg's deranged smile just widened as he dug deeper. "Tell me, Sir Joram? Is it a hundred? Two hundred? Maybe three hundred thousand gold coins will do for her life? Or maybe I should ask for seven hundred and thirty-nine thousand four hundred and sixty-seven gold coins in exchange for her life?" He demanded. The man's eyes went wide with consternation and Greg could understand why. Before the meeting with the spider queen went sideways, she had quoted this exact number to the merchant to show just how much she knew about the man and his finances as a warning. Not that the man had been willing to listen. This specific figure was the total amount of gold that the man had managed to amass over the years. That Greg knew it with such specificity, implied that Greg wasn't just some thug who had walked off the street and into his house, but rather, someone who had looked into the merchant deeply.

Greg's goal, however, wasn't to scare or stun the man, instead, his goal was to poison the trust between man and wife by revealing just how much he'd been keeping from her. Greg could remember during his first dungeon run that the man's wife had pleaded that he couldn't afford to pay anything above a hundred thousand gold coins as that would leave them in crippling debt. Only, during his last dungeon run, the man had been willing to bid half a million gold coins for his services. By quoting such a specific number, the man would know that his true wealth was already known and wouldn't be able to lie. Besides, with his life on the line, he was too distracted to much care that his wife found out that he'd been lying about how much money they had.

"Why so silent Sir Joram, come on, let's negotiate!" Greg mocked in a sneering tone suffused with hate. "Tell me, do you think all your wealth will be enough to bring back my sister to life?" he questioned.

"Look, what happened to your sister is regrettable. Give me the names of the men that were involved and I promise you, you will have their heads by the end of the day!" The man volunteered.

Greg allowed a smile to cross his face, though, from the look of the two before him, it didn't inspire much mirth in them. "The first man on that list, you may recognize," Greg answered like someone trying to be reasonable. "He's a merchant that goes by the name Sir Joram. And as for his head, you needn't worry about it, I will have it whether he wishes it or not," Greg growled. "Now, this is the last time I ask, either step away from your wife or die with her!" He said in the tone of one that had made up their mind. "You have three breaths to make up your mind. Three... two... one!

This was the only part of his plan that was a complete gamble. The one part that could undo everything that he'd set up before this moment. This was why Greg couldn't help but burst out in malicious laughter even as the arrow he'd just shot went through Sir Joram's shoulder and pinned him to the wall behind him. Greg knew that for all his faults, the man loved his wife in his own way. The question, and gamble, as far as Greg was concerned, was whether he loved his wife more than he loved himself and all that he'd earned. Would he be willing to die if it spared his wife from harm? Or would he buckle when faced with his mortality and choose to save his own skin over that of his wife?

Two things made Greg more inclined to believe that he wouldn't choose his wife over himself. The first was the man's past. His wife had once told Greg that the merchant came from the bottom rung of society and had shed blood, sweat, and tears to get to where he presently was. This, in and of itself wasn't a flaw. If anything, it was an accolade to the man that he'd made it out of poverty to where he currently was. The flaw in the man was that deep inside, he was still that boy who didn't have anything. That boy who had only known lack. It made him into the kind of person that was never content. He would see something he didn't have, go after it with everything he had, and get it. But once he had it, he'd quickly lose interest in it and move on to the next thing he didn't have.

This, in fact, was the motivation behind the second reason that Greg suspected that the man would pick himself over his wife. And that's the fact that he'd kept the majority of his wealth hidden from his wife. On some deep level, the money probably meant more to the man than his own wife. Which was why not even she was trusted with the true measure of his wealth. That way, if anything happened, not even his wife would be able to take from him what he valued most. It was based on these two factors that Greg had made his gamble. Rather than where he was, Greg had shot a little to the side along the path to the closest exit out of the room. Had he stood his ground, no harm would have come to the man, worse still, all his sins would have probably been forgiven by his wife seeing as he was willing to give up his life to keep her protected.

Instead, he took the coward's way out, much to Greg's delight. He hadn't just stepped to the side, the man had practically jumped toward the exit. Meaning that, had Greg shot where he'd been before it's his wife that would have been impaled by the arrow. So, not only had Greg given himself justified cause to seek the man's life, he had also revealed the man's true wealth making it clear that he'd been a liar. And to top it all off, he'd forced him to show that when it came down to it, the man would be willing to save his own skin as opposed to saving his wife. The stage was set perfectly...

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